Tarsnap: Online Backups for Security Conscious Geeks

Tarsnap is an online backup service written and run by Dr. Colin Percival, the FreeBSD Security Officer. The service is aimed at true UNIX geeks who want secure online backups and are familiar with things like GPG keys, compiling source code, bash scripts and cron jobs. It is built for the “truly paranoid” and encrypts all your data before it leaves your computer. It’s a great alternative for those who don’t trust their data to other services such as Mozy and Dropbox.

Installation

The installation instructions are just incomplete enough to make even seasoned Linux users do some quick google searches to fill in the gaps. To help you along, I’ve included my own instructions for installing Tarsnap on Ubuntu below. If you manage to get everything installed, the rest of the process should be pretty easy and even fun.

Pricing

Signing up for an account and adding money via PayPal was simple and painless. You need to add at least $5.00 to your account to get started as Tarsnap is a prepaid service. Storage costs 30 cents per GB per month. Transfer bandwidth to and from Tarsnap costs 30 cents per GB. While this isn’t the absolute cheapest online storage option, it is still rather reasonable. If you’re backing up smaller amounts of data, $5.00 might last you quite a long time. There are no montly fees and you only pay for what you use.

Making Backups

Getting backups set up is pretty easy if you’re familiar with Tar and things like cron jobs. Tarsnap is very similar to the Tar program that most UNIX admins use daily. There is no GUI, no backup scheduling, just a simple command line interface. If you want to schedule backups, you’ll need to write your own scripts and cron jobs. This might sound frightening to Linux beginners, but for seasoned users and administrators, Tarsnap’s simplicity and power is quite attractive. It should be especially great for system administrators who can probably augment or replace some of their existing backup systems with Tarsnap.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Tarsnap’s system. Once you have it set up, it is an incredibly simple system which gives you complete control over your backups. The de-duplication system and security design are very impressive, and having the source code available (with rather impressive bounties for finding bugs) makes me feel better about storing my backups online. I’m sure that I’ll be using Tarsnap in the future for backing up my most important files on both my desktop and servers.

Welcome to Starry Hope!

Starry Hope is a site about technology with a focus on open source software and Linux based operating systems. I try to post helpful information for others as I solve problems in the process of my work and play with computers. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS Feed or follow me on YouTube and Twitter.-- Jim Mendenhall